Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1541612
48 W I N T E R 2 0 2 6 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y Wow… And if you look, this is the same room now with the console. That's The Octopus [the one-inch, 8-track] and that's the 3-track that's on the left. Amazing. Using Cedar, I'll show you how we get them lined up. You can see on the song "As It Goes," the third track has two voices. [Hits Play and points to the stems in a timeline.] You can see the tape machine drift is nuts. If we get to the end and I unmute all of them … [a jumbled cacophony of tracks play], you hear how those machines were really drifting. Now, if you look at the session, you see the same tracks you were hearing, but all the transients have been lined up within a cycle. Got it. So, the [polarity inverting] still didn't work. It would work for a second and then … it just wasn't absolutely perfect. Once we got it to this point, I was like, "Let's see if we can try using AI to unmix from this point." I don't know if you've ever messed with that stuff, but in my experience, it doesn't work very well normally. You're talking about software that create stems out of a mixed track, correct? Yes. So, on a normal mix, like something with a big production where it's really dense and there's distorted guitars, it works, but you still hear artifacts. Sure. On this stuff, it lent to it really well, because A) I'm picking it off everything the first time it appears, so I'm not fighting with the whole mix all the time. And B) If you see here [points to a weak signal in the timeline], that's the bass and guitar. When the vocal comes in, it's so much louder. I think it was his headphone mix, which wasn't great. His newest overdub is always 10 dB too loud, and for the de-mixing, this discrepancy in volume worked out really well. The idea was now to then take each one of these stems and pull them apart as something new is introduced and remove it to make a multitrack. Also, because Les was the only guy overdubbing and going back-and-forth and back-and-forth, if you listen to one of his mixes compared to anyone else of that time, like Sinatra or Louis Armstrong, their records sound incredible. Les's sound crazy crunchy because they're 40-tape generations old, and he's doing all this crazy stuff like half-speeding and double-speeding. Now, everyone's blown away by the production because you've never heard someone shredding the guitar in three- part harmony. I think listeners just overlooked the fact that the records don't really sound very good. He eventually starts reversing his process so that the most important thing is the last thing recorded so you hear it prominently in the mix. There are all these crazy factors that are going on because he's trying to do these productions that no one else can do. Les Paul with Mary Ford.